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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Saturday, September 24, 2005

When an Estonian official once asked me about a suitable missionstatement or motto for his country. I suggested, only half-jokingly,"We told you so".Estonian smugness is of course legendary. But it is odd but truethat on most important questions the Estonians (and usually theLatvians and Lithuanians) have been right, whereas outsiders have beenwrong, sometimes wildly so.I remember being told forcefully in 1988 by one of the BBC's bestRussian-speakers that the "tiny Baltic Soviet republics" wanted onlyautonomy from the Kremlin. A handful of "nationalists", mainlyemigres, dreamed of full independence, but it was never going to happen.Luckily the Estonians took no notice. They never consideredthemselves to be a "Soviet republic", but rather an occupiedterritory. And they certainly did want independence. They went aheadwith the remarkable Congress of Estonia. Like its Latvian counterpart,this was an independently-elected alternative (ie non-Soviet)parliament which sought to recreate the republic abolished in 1940. Itwas an important reminder that the Baltic states were not seeking togain independence, but to regain it. This was the political equivalentof raising the Titanic—but most outsiders simply couldn't understandit, and dismissed the Congress as a nationalist stunt.Luckily the Estonians took no notice and focussed on restoring theprosperous, lawful country that was still—just—in living memory.That included modest attempts to restore Estonian as the statelanguage, and to try to induce the hundreds of thousands of Soviet-eramigrants to regularise their residence. The outside world (whichmostly has far harsher rules for migrants wanting to naturalise) wassure this would mean "Bosnia on the Baltic". There were countlessmonitoring missions and working groups. But the result was thathundreds of thousands of people have learnt Estonian (or Latvian) andgained citizenship. It's worked amazingly well.Then there was the senior IMF official in 1992 who told Estoniansto back "a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent", rather thanreintroducing (very successfully as it proved) the kroon.Luckily the Estonians took no notice. The government of Mart Laaralso ignored outsiders who told them not to privatise rapidly andfully, but to give state industry a lengthy, gentle transition. Thespeed of economic change did feel rather alarming (I was running anewspaper in Tallinn at the time) but it was the right policy. So wasthe decision to abolish tariffs and subsidies (now, sadly,reintroduced as a condition of EU membership). Equally successful—andaccompanied by dire warnings at the time—was the flat tax.I still remember a western ambassador who was reduced tohelpless giggles in the mid-1990s when I suggested that all threeBaltic states would be EU members in ten years' time. The combinationof outside competition and Brussels bureaucracy would cause themcollapse overnight, he told me. And Nato membership was not even ajoke, just dangerous nonsense—as late as 2000, much of theforeign-policy establishment in western Europe was convinced that sucha step would destroy relations with Russia.It's quite a long list, which might make Estonians and theirBaltic colleagues rather sceptical of outside advice. It might also,perhaps. make outsiders cautious about offering it, and keener tolearn from Estonia's example. So I am pleased that Britishcommentators are now writing enthusiastically about Estonia's flattax. But there is some way to go: the Sunday Telegraph two weeks agowrote enthusiastically that: "Mr Laar is tipped as a Europeancommissioner when [sic] his country joins the EU in 2007."

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economistedwardlucas@economist.com

Monday, September 19, 2005

Birthday parties have an added frisson when they celebrate a highlycontroversial birth. There was quite a bash the other day in thestreets of Tiraspol—a city that few Europeans would find on the map,although well known to arms-dealers, drug-smugglers, spies andsuchlike. For Tiraspol is the soi-disant capital of the soi-disantstate of Transdniestr.Depending on your political standpoint, Transdniestr is a valiantbastion of Russian language and culture, battling against fascistswanting a Greater Romania, and against American global hegemony. Or itis a corrupt tinpot dictatorship in a breakaway province that survivesthanks only to being useful to some very nasty strands of Russian (andto some extent Ukrainian) political and economic life.But like it or not, Transdniestr was 15 years old this month. Itcelebrated in style with a huge fun-fair, bombastic speeches—and mostimportantly "official" delegations from the other three unrecognisedstatelets of the post-Soviet landscape: Nagorno-Karabakh, SouthOssetia, and Abkhazia.There is an intriguing air of unreality about the idea ofnon-countries conducting pretend diplomacy with each other. During theCold War, the Polish government-in-exile in London used to havemeetings with the surviving Baltic diplomats, stranded there in dustyembassies while their countries were de facto part of the SovietUnion. Their status was a bit different though: the Balts still haddiplomatic status (because Britain didn't recognise the Sovietannexation) whereas the Poles were private citizens—at least untilPresident Lech Walesa invited them to Warsaw in 1990, and, gloriously,retrospectively recognised their legitimacy.For less noble reasons, Transdniestrians also hang on, hoping thatstubbornness will eventually bear fruit. But they don't exactly exudeconfidence. The official news agency, Olvia-press, recently publisheda fascinating commentary "exposing" the various western plots aimed atdestabilising Transdniestr by means of a "coloured revolution". Thefirst stage was the "transformation of society within Moldova" by"discrediting Soviet values, forming a pro-Western mentality and, mostimportantly, creating…total dependence on American bosses". The firsttwo of these sound highly desirable. And the third has not happened:American investors, sadly, are conspicuous by their absence; the USembassy seems rather underpowered, and the best-known American there ,the OSCE Ambassador William Hill, is something of a hate-figure forMoldovan nationalists.But never mind. Olvia-press goes on to outline the other scandaloustactics of the Anglo-American hegemons, particularly a highly sinisterprogramme called "Community Connections" which sponsors "leaders ofpublic organisations, the intelligentsia, journalists andrepresentatives of small and medium business" to go on short trips toAmerica. There, it claims, they are "brainwashed".That paranoid, exaggerated tone highlights the Tiraspolpropagandists' problem. If their system is so wonderful, then why arepeople so eager to go to horrid America? And why is it so easy forWestern propaganda to persuade Transdniestrian youngsters that EU andNato membership via a united Moldova will make them freer and richerthan living in a rogue statelet propped up by Russia? Grudgingly,Olvia-press blames a "certain complacency" among the Transdniestrianauthorities in dealing with the local youth. But it ends up insisting,with beautiful contradictoriness, that a) the American puppets areuseless; b) they steal their backers' money (that implies that thebrainwashing wasn't that effective); c) Transdniestrians love theirgovernment so much that no revolution is possible; and d) that theAmerican behaviour is highly provocative and should stop at once.I decode that to mean that America's democracy-promoters arebeginning to have quite an effect, and the regime is getting worried.Which is good news.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for TheEconomist.edwardlucas@economist.com

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

If your job involves Eastern Europe, August looks like a good time forholidays. As in most of the continent, it is a month when officialsare unavailable, government shuts down and people leave the cities tothe tourists.

But history suggests that it is a very good month if your job isjournalism. Among the stories you might have missed if you regularlytake holidays in August are the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the buildingof the Berlin Wall, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the birthof Solidarity, the first big hole in the Iron Curtain, the botchedcoup in Moscow that marked the end of the evil empire, the collapse ofthe Russian financial system and the sinking of the Kursk submarine.Against that background, how did August 2005 measure up? There havebeen interesting rumblings from Transdniester, and worrying ones fromMacedonia; a Serbian army helicopter planted a church on the top of amountain in Montenegro and the Czech prime minister apologised for thedeportation in 1945 of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. But the month'sreally big news has been from Poland.I don't mean the 25th anniversary of Solidarity's founding, or theopening salvos in the two upcoming election campaigns. Far moreimportant are Poland's rows - a Cold War in miniature - with Russiaand Belarus.Belarus is Europe's only remaining dictatorship, where the regime'slatest target is the country's biggest ethnic minority organisation,the Union of Poles (UPB). This might seem an odd target. Poles inBelarus are not highly politicised and the UPB's activities areinoffensive: chiefly Saturday schools for children, and folk-dancingevents. But the Belarusian authorities are not worried about theintellectual firepower of their opponents. They just dislike the factthat they exist at all. Any independent organisation, especially onewith foreign financial and other support, is a direct challenge to theclosed, monolithic society that the regime desires. So it hasdissolved the UPB and installed a more compliant leadership. It hasjailed Polish-language journalists, harassed activists, and deniedentry to, or deported, visitors from Poland.Although the regime has murdered people in the past, it has not usedforce this time. That's not the case in Poland's row with Russia,which began with the mugging in Warsaw of three teenagers from theRussian embassy. Russia treated this as a diplomatic incidentresulting directly from Poland's Russophobia, and demanded a formalapology. The verbal outbursts were followed by physical retaliation:in quick succession, two Polish embassy officials, and then a Polishjournalist, were beaten up in Moscow.What's ominous here is not that Russia and Belarus are behaving, asusual, unpleasantly. It's that the EU seems to have given up trying todefend its members, like Poland, who most need support. Where were theprotests from other European embassies when Poles were being beaten upin the streets of Moscow?When the new member states joined the EU last year, the bold aim wasto convince Russia that it could be friends with Western Europe onlyif it dropped its historical grudges against former captive nations inthe continent's east. That policy has, so far, failed totally.Instead, Russia is enjoying the sight of the powerful countries ofWestern Europe scurrying away from any possible conflict. It would benice to think that this is just an August blip; that when theimportant people return from their holidays, the EU will come outtoughly in defence of Poland.But I expect they'll play safe. And that, of course, is far moredangerous.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

To raise money for church repairs in my home village in south-westEngland, I have just given an illustrated talk there on 'Scrapes,scoops and spies' in Eastern Europe.

The first problem was showing how countries could appear and disappear- that's startling in a region that has not been near an internationalfrontier since 900 AD.But I found maps showing Europe in 1914, 1922, 1945 and now, whichillustrated well the crucial interplay between history and geography.Nor was it too hard showing resistance to communist rule, and theauthorities' response.For the communist seizure of power in 1945-48, I used pictures of twoof my Czechoslovak heroes, Jan Masaryk (the last non-communist foreignminister, who fell to his death, probably not unassisted, from thewindow of his flat high up in the foreign ministry building) andMilada Horakova. She survived a Nazi concentration camp only to behanged after a communist show trial in 1950.There were excellent pictures, too, of the East German workers'uprising of 1953, of Hungary in 1956, of the Soviet-led invasion ofCzechoslovakia in 1968 and of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-81.But what was missing from the internet were images of the communistsystem itself. (I thought it would be cheating to use commercial photolibraries, so I was relying only on what the general public can findvia the internet search engine, Google.)I searched in vain for illustrations of the degradation andfrustration of everyday life, of empty shops and squalid housing.I did find one picture of the world's worst car, the Soviet-madeZaporozhets - but it was a lovingly restored one owned by an eccentricAmerican collector, not the usual stinking rusty deathtrap.Illustrating the moral dimension, of collaboration and deceit, waseven harder.Some extracts from works by Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky and MilanKlima would have done the job perfectly, given the time to read themaloud: the real face of totalitarianism is sad, shabby compromisesmade by sad, shabby people. That is ideal material for novelists, lessso for photographers.It was hard too to explain wear and tear on my own nerves. Westernjournalists behind the Iron Curtain worried often that we wereendangering our contacts, or (occasionally) that they might compromiseus. Soviet-block foreign correspondents in the West were almostinvariably spies; the communist authorities assumed we were too. Thatmeant a regular diet of hassles (ranging from blocked phones tohoneytraps) and threats of expulsion.Sometimes these were comical. In Prague the authorities complainedabout my frequent visits to the British embassy.I was happy to explain that I was going not to pick up secretinstructions, but in the hope that the little shop there might havenew supplies of life-preserving Marmite (a yeasty gunk that Brits eatspread on hot buttered toast).In Soviet-occupied Estonia I was the first Western journalist tointerview the head of the KGB in Tallinn. I started the interview byasking: "Am I the first Westerner to come into this building?" Hereplied coolly: "Let's say that you will be the first Westerner toleave it." I got goosepimples: remembering that anti-communistpartisans sent by Britain (and betrayed by British traitor Kim Philby)had been tortured and murdered in that very building in the 1950s.When the KGB collapsed in 1991, the Estonians found a machine in thebasement that, seemingly, had been used for mincing up bodies. PerhapsI should have got a picture of that.

[ps from Edward: we did use a picture of that mincing machine in the BalticIndependent when I was editing it]

New blog!

This site is no longer active. Please go to edwardlucas.com/blog instead

Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)